Lestrade and the Sign of Nine

By Sara Hughes

Book two in the Inspector Lestrade series.

It was a puzzle that faced Scotland Yard from its very begin-ning – whose was the limbless body found among the foundations? And in the murderous world of Sholto Lestrade, one question is invariably followed by another – what do a lecherous rector, a devious speculator and a plagiaristic novel-ist have in common? Answer: they're all dead, each of them with a bloody space where his skull used to be. And six others are to join them before our intrepid inspector brings the per-petrator to book.

But 1886 was a bad year for the Metropolitan Police. The People of the Abyss have heard the whisper and the spectre of Communism haunts the land. There is a new Commissioner, a regular martinet, at the Yard. And then, there is that very odd couple, sometime of Baker Street …

Lestrade braves haunted houses, machine-gun bullets and two Home Secretaries in his headlong hunt for the truth. And at last, this is the book that chronicles his now legendary impersonation of the Great Sarah Bernhardt. The Police Re-vue was never the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BLKDOG Publishing
• Release date: Sep 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393287926

Sara Hughes

M.J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King’s College, London and is probably best known today for his true crime and crime fiction works. He has always been fascinated by Richard III and, following on from Richard III in the North, also by Pen and Sword, has hopefully finally scotched the rumour that Richard III killed the princes in the Tower. He divides his time between homes in the Isle of Wight and the Land of the Prince Bishops.

Book preview

❖1❖

T

he gentleman with the mournful face and obsolete Dundrearies wandered through his own foundations for the last time. He kicked, in the melancholy way that architects do, the footings of the drains that would have led, in another, less practical world, from those urinals where the illustrious of the world of opera would have relieved themselves. Don Giovanni peeing hand in hand with Die Fledermaus.

Feet below him, where Ancient Britons had thrown all manner of things into the London clay, two workmen hacked at the grey, unyielding slime with pick and shovel. Sweat ran from their leather caps and soaked the scarves tied roughly around their necks.

‘’Ow did you get on wiv ’Egel, then, Clarence?’ the older man asked, rolling up his drooping sleeves.

‘All right, Arfur,’ his mate said, grunting as the pick bounced on a particularly recalcitrant boulder. The sparks flew upward. ‘I particularly liked his concept of Being.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Clarence paused, inverting the pick and resting on its head as generations of construction workers had done since Time Immemorial, ‘Being and the idea are identical. The idea, y’see, contains of itself the capacity for developin’ into all the determinin’ attributes of being, into all that makes Being Being.’

‘Wiv you so far,’ Arfur thrust home a shovel.

‘O’ course,’ Clarence wiped the sweat from his mouth, ‘Being is at first indeterminate, wivout properties or qualities. It passes out o’ this condition and into uvverness, its negation, you might say, its opposite.’

‘So,’ Arfur took up the man’s drive, ‘then, this negation, as ’Egel rightly calls it, becomes the principle of a continuous series of ’igher and successive affirmations. Am I right or am I right?’

‘You ain’t wrong, squire,’ Clarence assured him, easing himself down on an upturned bucket. ‘Vus, pure light is the same as darkness and is at first invisible, but after it ’as passed into darkness, it returns to itself, takes on colour and vus becomes visible. I’m not bein’ too didactic ’ere, am I?’

‘Not in the slightest, Clarence.’ Arfur perched himself on a protruding rock. ‘After all, when all’s said and done, everythin’ must ’ave an opposite or contradictory – were it not so, nuffink could come into existence.’

‘Quite. But on the uvver ’and, take panfeism . . .’

A whistle shattered the morning.

Arfur scanned the skyline of the Strand in search of a clock. ‘Not tea break yet, is it, Clarence?’

‘It is not, Arfur. ’Ello – that mournful bloke wiv the obsolete Dundrearies looks as though ’e wants a word.’

‘We should always listen to the bourgeoisie, Clarence. At least for the time being.’

‘In what sense are you usin’ the term being there, then Arfur?’

‘Gather round, you men!’ the mournful bloke took a central position on a pile of bricks. ‘Good morning, men.’

There were a few grumbles in return. A handful of the brown, sweat-soaked veterans took off their caps under the sun. Arfur and Clarence did likewise.

‘I am Norman Shaw,’ the mournful bloke told them, ‘the Architect of this magnificent edifice on the foundations of which you are now actively engaged.’

‘Got a good articulacy, ain’t ’e, Arfur?’ Clarence observed from the corner of his mouth.

‘Brilliant, Clarence.’

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, men,’ Shaw went on.

The tapping of a hammer from near the river stopped.

‘There, I said ’e looked mournful,’ Clarence whispered.

‘Just as well,’ Arfur observed, ‘I was beginnin’ to fink ’e always looked like that.’

‘I received confirmation this morning that this building is not to be used as an Opera House after all.’

There were boos and cries of ‘Shame!’

‘Oh dear,’ muttered Arfur, ‘there goes Rigoletto out the winder.’

‘Bleedin’ disgustin’,’ Clarence nodded.

‘But fear not,’ Shaw continued, ‘your jobs are not in jeopardy. This building ... ’ and he turned away from them for a moment to compose himself. ‘This building is to be handed over to the Metropolitan Police as their new Headquarters.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘Stone me,’ breathed Arfur, ‘the unfinkin’ lackeys of a bourgeois, Imperialist State.’

‘As I live and breave,’ Clarence agreed.

‘Well, that’s all chaps,’ Shaw fought back the tears. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’

Another silence.

Arfur broke it in the time-honoured way. ‘Never mind, sir. Free cheers for Mr Shaw, lads. ’Ip-’ip!’

‘’Ooray,’ the workforce chorused.

‘’Ip-’ip!’

‘’Ooray.’

‘’Ip-’ip!’

‘’Ooray.’

‘Men, men,’ Shaw held up a carefully manicured architect’s hand, ‘I am more touched than I can say. You are white men all.’

‘There is that as consolation,’ Clarence took up his pick again.

‘What’s that, ol’ son?’

‘We are white men. ’Uddled masses, yes. Downtrodden minions of the lumpenproletariat, but at least we ain’t black.’

‘That’s fair enough,’ Arfur observed.

‘’Ere, did you know?’ Clarence’s pick bounced off the outcrop again, ‘did you know that them there stones for the foundations ’ave come from Dartmoor? Where some poor wronged individual what ’as ’ad the misfortune to be born among the People of the Abyss is, even as we speak, spendin’ ’is daylight hours crackin’ rocks for ’Er Majesty the Queen?’

‘Well, there you ’ave it, Clarence.’

‘I do?’

‘You do. You do realize that your namesake, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, will, when ’e comes of age, inherit the biggest and most corrupt Empire the world ’as ever known, don’t you?’

‘It ’ad occurred to me, Arfur. Let’s not be small-minded. That’s the politics of envy, that is. Besides, this is Gladstone’s England, you know.’

‘Sadly, Clarence, I am well aware whose England it is. ’Owever, the time is coming.’

‘Ah yes, the Millennium of the People. When’s the Revolution planned for again?’

‘February the sixth of next year. Can you make it?’

‘I’ll ’ave to consult my calendar . . . oh, bleedin’ ’ell’

Clarence froze in mid swing.

Thinking that some new point of the dialectic had occurred to his young friend, Arfur waited, his shovel loaded with the greasy grey of London’s river. Then he saw what Clarence had seen and dropped the lot. The younger man’s pick had hacked into what once was a woman. Now it was a torso, a headless, legless, armless thing lying in the London clay. The acidity of the ground had preserved it perfectly and the breasts still had something of the pertness of life.

‘Lends a ’ole new meanin’ to the body politic, don’t it, Arfur?’ Clarence whispered.

‘It bleedin’ well does, son. Get that architect bloke over ‘ere, will you? Should be an hour or two’s rest in this.’

There was not, on the fact of it, a lot happening that February. Policemen all over the Metropolis faced the rather daunting task of executing the Act of the 49th Victoria, viz and to wit that all dogs wandering in the region of the capital should be muzzled. That probably had something to do with the fact that a fox had been killed in Marylebone High Street. Mr Terriss was wowing them at the Adelphi and our brave boys in Burma were complaining, with some justification, that their bayonets were bending on contact with Burmese bandits rather than going straight through the little yellow bastards. There were red faces at Enfield where they made the things. Then the snow came . . .

They crept out from between the black buildings crowned with white, the half-starving People of the Abyss. But there were no women in this crowd, no children. Just ragged lines of ragged men, their faces blue and pinched above their knotted scarves, their eyes dark hollows under their beaver hats. Their hobnails crunched on the unbroken snow and their breath snaked out on the crisp air.

No one saw them at first, certainly not the occupants of the hansom parked in Hanover Square. The cabbie leaned against his hack, drawing on the roll of darkest shag he had spent the last half an hour creating. In the relative snug of the vehicle two men sat swathed in plaid blankets, one of them sipping now and then from a flask.

‘Deuc’d nippy this afternoon, Holmes,’ the ruddier of the two noted, tapping on the frosted window.

‘February the eighth, Watson.’ His companion had no need of a calendar to tell him. ‘Minus two.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. Cocoa?’

The taller man rejected the offer with a quiver of his aquiline nostrils.

‘Do you think he’ll be much longer?’

‘Patience, Watson,’ Holmes smiled with the serenity of an anaconda, ‘is a virtue known only to a select few – like myself, for instance.’

‘I’m not cut out for surveillance,’ the good doctor observed. ‘Haven’t the bottom for it.’

‘Nor the top, I fear, Watson.’ Holmes tapped his cranium without taking his eyes off the house in the far corner of the square.

‘As you say, Holmes, as you say. What do you think he’s doing?’

‘The Count?’ Holmes allowed himself a hollow chuckle. It was a rare moment in their relationship. ‘Mark my words, Watson, in . . .’ he fished out his silver hunter from the folds of his Ulster, ‘. . . a little under three minutes, a gnarled old woman will emerge from that house. She will have a severely pronounced limp, of the left leg, I fancy a spinal curvature which would put my Meerschaum to shame and at least two molars will be missing, presumed lost.’

‘Good heavens, Holmes, you never cease to astound me.’

‘I know, Watson.’

‘Who will she be, Holmes, this vile harpy of the night?’

‘This vile harpy of the night, Watson,’ Holmes sighed, ‘will be – and indeed is – Count Ortega Y Gomez himself.’

‘The swine!’ Watson bounced the flask on his blanketed thigh so that the cocoa drenched them both. ‘Oh, sorry, Holmes! The swine! So that’s what he’s doing in there – changing.’

‘Not uniquely, old fellow,’ Holmes mechanically sponged himself down. ‘He’ll be forging the government papers we spoke of.’

‘Ah, he has the testimonials!’ All was becoming clear to Watson now.

‘Of course. You only have to look at him to know that.’

There was a tap on the window and a grimy cabbie thrust his head in, wreathing Watson momentarily in smoke, ‘Er . . . gents, the meter’s runnin’ you know.’

Watson batted aside the smog. ‘You’re being handsomely paid, fellow,’ he reminded him.

‘Not well enough for them, I ain’t.’

Watson followed the driver’s jerking thumb. Dark-coated dark-eyed men were crossing the square, like a ragged battalion on the march, dressing from right to left, cudgels at the slope.

‘Er . . . Holmes,’ the doctor muttered.

‘Shut the window, there’s a good fellow.’ Holmes was intent on the house in the opposite direction.

‘Well, that’s just it, Holmes, there seems to be rather an absence of good fellows at the moment. Look!’

The World’s Greatest Detective turned to Watson’s window. ‘Hmm,’ he nodded, ‘they are a little late for the January Sales.’

‘Right,’ they heard the cabbie growl, ‘I’m orff,’ and he hopped up onto his perch.

‘Stay where you are, driver!’ Holmes roared. ‘I shall report you to the Hackney Carriage Drivers’ Association for conduct unbecoming.’

‘You do what you bloody well like mate. This ’ere vehicle is my bread and butter. Up, Bucephalus!’ and he lashed the weary animal with his whip.

The crack of the leather seemed to galvanize the horde of black-coated men. The centre made a grab for the horse-collar and bridle, clinging on to the harness until the confused beast was slowed by the sheer press of men. The cabbie laid about him with his whip, then someone dragged him off his perch and he disappeared among the shoulders and flying fists.

‘Right,’ a voice bellowed, ‘Let’s ’ave them bastards out!’ And they wrenched the door off its hinges.

‘Shall I use my army service revolver, Holmes?’ Watson had dropped his cocoa again.

‘Waste of lead, my dear fellow,’ Holmes observed. ‘They’re only the sweepings of the gaols. Hit them with your Gladstone.’

‘It’s Gladstone!’ one of the roughs shouted. ‘It’s old Glad Eye.’

‘Blimey! The Prime Minister. The GOM. ’isself!’ and the impressed crowd stood back.

Watson looked frantically at Holmes. ‘They think one of us is Gladstone, Holmes,’ he hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘What’ll we do?’

‘Elementary, old fellow. We do what the real Gladstone would do – make empty promises we can’t possibly keep.’

‘We, Holmes?’

The Great Detective sighed anew. ‘Shrewd of you to spot the plurality of the situation, Watson. Clearly, I cannot possibly pass as a man of seventy-six with a father who grew sugar and owned workshops in Liverpool. You on the other hand have no patrician features to disguise. Things would be different of course were I carrying my Leichner waxes. Well, get on with it, man. Pretend this is the Midlothian campaign all over again and make a speech. And don’t forget to wave your arms about.’

Watson hauled the plaid off his knees and in a moment of inspiration wrapped it over his shoulders. He dashed nervous fingers through his hair to give it that Gladstonian mania, pinged his Eton collar up round his ears and balanced gingerly on the step of the cab.

‘My mission,’ he said to the murmuring, jostling crowd, ‘. . . er . . . is to pacify Ireland.’

There was a silence.

‘Never mind about Ireland, your honour,’ a voice called back. ‘Wot abaht the workers?’

The cry was taken up.

‘Er . . .’ Watson held up his hand, ‘I can offer you . . . um . . . nothing but blood, sweat and tears,’ he said.

‘Who killed Gordon?’ another voice bawled.

‘Er . . . we will fight them on the beaches,’ Watson countered without conviction, but the crowd surged forward, chanting ‘M.O.G.! M.O.G.! and rocking the hansom backwards and forwards, holding the head of the whinnying horse.

‘Promise me, old fellow,’ Holmes gripped the upholstery, ‘that you’ll never try a career in politics.’

‘I thought those bits were quite good, Holmes,’ Watson bridled along with the hack, ‘the blood, sweat and tears bit and that thing about fighting them on the beaches.’

‘Didn’t do much good, did it, old fellow?’ Holmes hissed through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve changed my mind about your service revolver. Shoot a few of the working-class bastards.’

A shot shattered the noise. The crowd pulled back, letting the hansom rock quietly to stillness. The dazed cabbie hauled himself upright and clung desperately around the neck of his horse, his head pouring with blood.

Watson checked his pocket. No, the Webley hadn’t gone off by accident. There was no smell of powder and no gaping hole where his testicles used to be. It did give him pause for thought however about carrying a pistol with no safety catch so near his staff of life. He poked a crimson head out of the gap where the door had hung.

A small knot of uniformed policemen, no more than six men strong, stood, truncheons at the slope, behind a yellow-faced ferret of a man in a bowler hat and ageless Donegal who twirled with a certain dexterity a twelve-bore shotgun, still smoking in the crisp morning air.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. You are all under arrest.’

‘What for?’ a rough yelled.

‘Disturbing Her Majesty’s Peace,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Damaging a hansom cab, thereby rendering it less than handsome, frightening a Hackney horse – no doubt the RSPCA will be in touch; being unpleasant to two respectable gentlemen going about their lawful business; oh, and breaking the nose of a Hackney Carriage Driver, licence number . . . er . .?’

‘Four free free,’ the cabbie managed, his nose spreading slowly over his face.

‘There’s only . . . um . . . seven o’ you,’ another rough shouted.

‘Sergeant,’ Lestrade turned to the man at his right elbow, ‘tell these gentlemen all about Metropolitan Procedure One Three Eight, would you.’

‘Yessir, certainly, sir,’ the sergeant cleared his throat. ‘Metropolitan Procedure One Three Eight states that in the context of crowd control no police action shall be undertaken unless the said police outnumber the said crowd eight to one.’

‘Especially . . .?’ Lestrade reminded his man.

‘Especially on Mondays.’

‘You’re bluffin’,’ a rough growled.

Lestrade pointed to the roof of an adjoining building. Against the pearly haze of the February sky, a lone helmeted bobby straightened from his hiding place.

The Inspector pointed again to another building where a young rookie rather spoiled the triumph of the moment by smiling down at him and waving. He pointed a third time and yet another boy in blue emerged from the roof railings.

‘Three sides of the square surrounded, gentlemen,’ Lestrade said. ‘Which leaves the side behind you – the one that faces the City whence I suspect most of you came. Constable,’ he turned to the man on his left, ‘be so good as to recite for these gentlemen Metropolitan Procedure Eight Two Nine.’

The constable cleared his throat. ‘Metropolitan Procedure Eight Two Nine clearly states that no foot action of the police vis à vis a crowd situation is to be undertaken without the use of the Mounted Division and said Mounted Division is to be equipped with extra-long truncheons and if need be, lances.’

‘Lances!’ the crowd muttered, stumbling backward.

‘If you put your ears to the ground gentlemen,’ Lestrade said, ‘you will probably catch the cad . . . cade . . . rhythm of their hoof beats galloping along the Tottenham Court Road in this general direction as I speak. You will also catch frostbite on account of the snow, but that’s a small price to pay for Social Democracy, isn’t it?’

‘Er . . . Inspector Lestrade, sir,’ the sergeant tapped his superior’s shoulder.

‘Yes, sergeant, I’m a busy man. What is it?’

‘Shouldn’t we oughta tell them about Metropolitan Procedure Three Nine Two, sir?’

‘Oh, now, that’s a bit extreme, sergeant,’ Lestrade frowned. ‘The baby Howitzer, I mean. You know we aren’t allowed to use it within half a mile of the Palace.’

But the crowd hadn’t waited to hear more. First one, then knots of three and four melted away from the back. Then the whole black-coated rabble began to run, fanning out of the square by every available orifice and covering their heads with their hands to avoid the missiles being rained on them by the scores of policemen above.

‘I think this puts the lid on Rousseau’s concept of the General Will, Clarence, don’t you?’ Lestrade heard a fleeing rough call.

‘I do, Arfur, I do. Maybe the lumpenproletariat aren’t ready for the barricades yet. Next September do you?’

‘Better make it the September after, Clarence, if it’s all the same to you. I’ve got that Emmanuel Kant to get frough yet.’

‘There’s no need to be unpleasant to what I feel is essentially a well-meanin’ body of philosophers, Arfur.’

And the two voices echoed away through the side streets that twisted to the East End.

The Inspector turned to his sergeant. ‘You’d better get your three blokes down from there before they freeze to death.’

‘Yessir. Very good, sir,’ the sergeant waved his boys down. ‘It’s a good thing we happened upon you, sir, off-duty an’ all. What is all that guff about Metropolitan Procedures? We ain’t ’eard of ’em in C Division.’

‘Neither had I until five minutes ago,’ Lestrade winked at him, ‘but you remembered your lines well, sergeant . . . er . . .?’

‘Regan, sir. This is Constable Carter.’

‘You’ll go far, lads.’

‘Lestrade!’

‘Ah,’ the Inspector turned to the wrecked hansom. ‘Mr Gladstone, sir, I trust you aren’t injured.’

‘Damn you, Lestrade, for your confounded cheek!’ Holmes snapped.

‘Ah,’ he tipped his bowler, ‘you must be Mr Morley.’

‘Please, Lestrade,’ Holmes shuddered. ‘It’s been a ghastly enough day without being taken for a Liberal. Besides, no attempts at satire, please. You haven’t the wit for it.’

‘Oh, come now, Holmes,’ Watson flustered, ‘I mean, damn it all, Lestrade here probably saved our lives. A moment later . . .’

‘A moment later and I’d have had my quarry,’ the Great Detective sneered. ‘As it is, the Count is long gone by now – halfway to the Docks, I shouldn’t wonder. Why is it, Lestrade, that just as my vast intellect is about to produce dazzling results, your great flat feet come trampling all over the place?’

‘Luck, I suppose,’ Lestrade said.

Holmes closed to his man. ‘Keep out of my way, Lestrade, that’s all I ask. London isn’t big enough for both of us.’

‘I say, Holmes,’ Watson chortled, ‘that’s rather a cliché isn’t it?’

‘No, it isn’t!’ Holmes snapped. ‘I leave that sort of thing to your friend Conan Doyle. Cabbie!’ The driver lifted a battered head out of a handkerchief. Luckily for him, it was his own head and still marginally attached to his neck. ‘221B Baker Street and double quick time.’

‘Right,’ the whip snaked out and the hack jerked forward, happy to feel the presence of the hames in action again. ‘But what about my door?’

Even the assorted clutch of constables blanched at Holmes’s reply to that one.

Lestrade eased back the serpentine of the twelve-bore.

‘Sergeant, you’d better have one of your men return this to Mr Wesson the gunsmith. Thank him for allowing us to borrow it. For the spent cartridge he’ll have to sign in triplicate.’

‘Very good, sir. Er . . . sir . . . I hope, on the acquaintanceship of a few moments you won’t presume it forward of me, but . . .’

‘Yes, man, spit it out.’

‘Well, I was just wondering, sir, where did the cartridge go? Only there’s blood all down your leg and on the snow where you’ve been walking.’

Lestrade glanced down. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘so there is,’ and he toppled forward in the slush.

Across the road from where a group of constables were lifting an unconscious Inspector on to their shoulders prior to the solemn walk to Charing Cross Hospital, a gnarled old woman dragged her gammy left leg down the steps of the grand old house in the corner. Her back slewed to the right and she grinned at the